The Probabilistic Fertility Table and Its Applications

Nan Li, United Nations

A fertility table describes the childbearing process of a hypothetical female cohort that subjects neither mortality nor migration. This paper first proposes a concise fertility table that could describe family structures such as the proportion families by the number of children, or the proportion of children by the number of siblings. The concise fertility table, however, is deterministic. To describe the uncertainty of childbearing process, the second part of this paper is to extend the concise fertility table from deterministic to probabilistic, using the method of developing probabilistic life tables. Using probabilistic fertility tables, one can test, for example, whether a change in total fertility is statistically significant or not.